flora

Flora

Flora is a FLexible Open Rest API framework for Node.js.

It is still under heavy develoment, but slowly approaching beta status

Flora requires node v6 or higher.

Features

• Resources in resources (recursive) - fetch as much as possible in one request, without duplicating code
• Lightweight (but powerful) field/sub-resource selection syntax - fetch exactly what you need in one request
• Filter resources even by sub-resource-attributes - resolve inside database when possible, else feeding ID-lists
• Pluggable DataSources - currently implemented: MySQL, Solr/Lucene
• Combine multiple DataSources - even on per-row-basis - "API-side-JOIN"
• Highly optimized database querys - internal SQL parser to remove unselected fields and thus unreferenced LEFT JOINs
• Locale: Parameterize JOINs i.e. with a localeId - no need for database views which can't be parameterized
• Handle all your special cases as good as possible - callbacks for "everything"

Server-Features

• Node.js HTTP-Server and Cluster based implementation with self-monitoring process-management
• Extremely verbose server-status - see everytime what the server is doing and what is hanging around in production
• Straightforward logging/error handling - i.e. forward all errors to your favorite "error-monitoring-tool"
• Updates in production with zero downtime - almost every part of code and config is replaceable without shutdown
• Comfortable development-features - usual "code-change - F5 - see result"-workflow

Design Goals

• Generic implementation just for reading - offer helper for writing
• Easy abstraction of complex and distributed database structures
• Easy standard cases with minimal boilerplate code - special cases possible - "everywhere"
• Flexibility, stability, performance, simplicity, transparency

Examples

URL structure

Format:

/path/to/resource/<id>
    ?do=<action>
    &select=xxx
    &filter=xxx
    &limit=10
    &page=1
    &width=100 (additional parameters)
    &height=100

Examples:

• GET /article/123 (retrieve article 123 as JSON)
• GET /article/ (list of all articles)

Resource-Implementation

module.exports = (api) => {
    return {
        actions: {
            retrieve: (request, response) => {
                api.resourceProcessor.handle(request, response)
            },

            hello: (request, response) => {
                response.send('Hello World');
            }
        }
    }
};

Abstract definition

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<resource primaryKey="id" xmlns:flora="urn:flora:options">
    <flora:dataSource type="mysql" database="contents" table="user"/>
    <id type="int"/>
    <firstname/>
    <lastname/>
</resource>

License

MIT